Affricate consonant explained

Affricates are consonants that begin as stops (most often an alveolar, such as or) but release as a fricative (such as or or occasionally into a fricative trill) rather than directly into the following vowel.

Samples

The English sounds spelled "ch" and "j" (transcribed and in IPA), German and Italianz and Italianz are typical affricates. These sounds are fairly common in the world's languages, as are other affricates with similar sounds, such as those in Polish and Chinese. However, other than, voiced affricates are relatively uncommon. For several places of articulation they are not attested at all.

Much less common are labiodental affricates, such as in German and Izi, or velar affricates, such as in Tswana (written kg) or High Alemannic Swiss German dialects. Worldwide, only a few languages have affricates in these positions, even though the corresponding stop consonants are virtually universal. Also less common are alveolar affricates where the fricative is lateral, such as the sound found in Nahuatl and Totonac. Many Athabaskan languages (such as Dene Suline and Navajo) have series of coronal affricates that may be unaspirated, aspirated, or ejective in addition to being interdental/dental, alveolar, postalveolar, or lateral, i.e.,,,,,,,,,,,, and .

Notation

Affricates are often represented by the two sounds of which they consist . However, single signs for the affricates may be desirable, in order to stress that they function as unitary speech segments (i.e. phonemes). In this case, the IPA recommends joining the two elements of the affricate by a tie bar . Though they are no longer standard IPA, ligatures are available in Unicode for the six common affricates,,,,, .

Another method is to indicate the release of the affricate with a superscript:, . This is derived from the IPA convention of indicating other releases with a superscript.

In other phonetic transcription systems, such as the Americanist system, the affricates,,,,, are represented as or ;,, or (older) ; or ;,, or (older) ; ; and or respectively. Within the IPA, and are sometimes transcribed with the symbols for the palatal stops, and .

Affricates vs. stop-fricative sequences

Klallam affricate in 'look at me' versus stop–fricative in 'he looks at it'.

In the stop-fricative sequence, the stop has a release burst before the fricative starts; but in the affricate, the fricative element is the release. Stop-fricative sequences may have a syllable boundary between the two segments, but not necessarily.

In English, and (nuts, nods) are considered phonemically stop-fricative sequences because they may contain a morpheme boundary (for example, nuts = nut + s). But the sounds are phonetically affricates. The English affricate phonemes and do not require a morpheme boundary. The sounds are sometimes written with the unitary symbols and, though it is not considered standard IPA notation. However, English speakers (depending on dialect) do distinguish affricates from stop–fricative sequences:

The acoustic difference between affricates and stop+fricative sequences is rate of amplitude increase of the frication noise, which is known as the rise time. Affricates have a short rise time to the peak frication amplitude while sequences of stop and fricative have relatively longer rise time (Howell & Rosen 1983, Johnson 2003, Mitani et al. 2006).

List of affricates

In the case of coronals, the symbols are normally used for the stop portion of the affricate regardless of place. For example, is commonly seen for . For legibility, the tie bars have been removed from the table entries.

The exemplar languages are ones that these sounds have been reported from, but in several cases they may need confirmation.

Heterorganic affricates

While most affricates are homorganic, Navajo and Chiricahua Apache have a heterorganic alveolar-velar affricate (McDonough & Ladefoged 1993, Hoijer & Opler 1938). Other heterorganic affricates are reported for Northern Sotho (Johnson 2003) and other Bantu languages such as Phuthi, which has alveolar-labiodental affricates and, and Sesotho, which has bilabial-palatoalveolar afficates and . Djeoromitxi (Pies 1992) has and .